Over the last couple of weeks Visual Studio has started to infuriate me.  First it was the WPF designer and just now it was adding new items to the toolbox.  Essentially what was happening was that Visual Studio would just disappear; no errors, no dialogs, no crash report. 

The WPF designer issue crops up whenever I wanted to edit a xaml file.  I’d tried opening it as XAML only but to no avail.  Opening it as just xml works and allows changes but of course you lose all your intellisense (writing XAML is a pita at the best of time and just a miserable experience if you don’t have intellisense).  I half resolved this issue: Karl has a post here that points to a hotfix that works on all platforms except Windows 7 (that would be me). My resolution involved moving to a different machine that wasn’t running Windows 7 when doing WPF work.

Now when I went to add a new item to the toolbox this morning I ran into what appeared to be the same issue.  This connect issue shows a number of people seeing the same issue.  Most of them have found solace in removing PowerCommands, even if they didn’t have it installed in the first place. However, the workaround is actually to run Visual Studio in safe mode (ie devenv /safemode) as discussed here and here.